


All along it was a fever

by destinyofshipwreck



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Carmen angst, F/M, Infidelity, Superstition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2019-06-07 10:15:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15216968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destinyofshipwreck/pseuds/destinyofshipwreck
Summary: On the podium, Scott's hand drifts low on the small of her back and she has to take a deep steadying breath to stop herself from flinching away from him. Her superstitious brain latches on to any pattern it can, and as she mouths the words to the anthem, she pleads with it in her head: not this, we didn't win because I kept my hands off him, it has nothing to do with anything, please, don't think it’s this.





	All along it was a fever

Scott paces around his living room and Tessa tries not to watch him from the kitchen table, staring down at her cooling cup of coffee instead. They're anxious, waiting for Marina, in the office at the rink, to decide if they're going to Finland, notwithstanding the neck strain he insists isn’t serious.

Her suitcases are sitting in the hall by the door next to his; she'd hauled them up at six in the morning when she came over to share a cab to the airport, over an hour ago.

When Marina calls his landline to tell them that the answer is no, they're sitting this one out, he slams his fist into the wall.

He fares worse than it does, plaster over masonry in an eighty-year-old apartment block. He swears under his breath, wrenching the freezer open and fumbling through it for something to use as an icepack, split knuckles already starting to swell.

There's no talking him down when he's like this, so she leaves him to seethe and buys herself breakfast instead, and takes a stroll in the crisp fall breeze to the used bookstore for a couple of Carol Shields novels to fill the rest of the day now that it won't be spent travelling, and falls asleep on the couch two-thirds of the way through  _Unless_ , waking up sometime well after dark with the paperback open and facedown on her chest.

Her sleep for the rest of the night is fitful. The wind picks up around two or three, knocking next door's eavestrough against the shingles where it's come loose from the roof, sending a garbage can rolling noisily the length of the alley, snapping branches off the old oak trees in her neighbourhood and setting off car alarms. It's a relief not to have to attribute her insomnia solely to disappointment.

She spends the next morning between the gym and the ice, methodically drilling crossovers alone, while Scott, who's supposed to be resting at home but insisted she pick him up on her way in, sits sullenly at rinkside, glowering at nothing.

"Would you quit sulking," she says, when she's done for the day. He doesn't answer, but he does hand her her skate guards over the boards, and he does reach for her shoulder to steady her when she leans over to put them on, wincing a little when he thinks she's looking away.

"It's such a stupid waste," he mumbles eventually, trailing after her, halfway down the hall to the locker room.

"You're only here because I drove you here, you can't even turn your head, there's nothing you're supposed to be doing," she says. "Will you knock it off if I relax with you? We could make an afternoon of it. Doughnuts and daytime TV."

"You don't have to placate me, I'm not a child," he says.

"Well, then stop acting like one," she says, and bumps his elbow delicately with her own, with not enough force to jostle his shoulder or neck.

"Fine," he says. "But you're buying."

The doughnuts aren't Tim's, but they suffice. The Price is Right gives way first to a daytime talk show and then a soap, which she watches with exaggeratedly avid interest to make him laugh at her attention to detail, and with her legs draped across his lap.

By the end of the afternoon he's finally relaxed enough to push her jeans up to the knees and absentmindedly rub her calves, an old and long familiar habit. During the climactic scene in their soap, a shouting match at a garden party between two characters who might be sisters, she can't recall, she reaches for his closest hand. He intertwines his fingers with hers, briefly, then shifts his grip to trace the lines of her palm with the tip of his thumb.

When the six o'clock news comes on, he turns the TV off, without letting go of her hand.

"Any plans for tonight?" he asks, starting to turn to face her, flinching and turning back when he hits the edge of his range of motion.

"Not really anymore, no," she says. "How about you?"

"Schedule's completely clear," he says.

So rare, they shouldn't waste it, she thinks. It's been weeks since they had any unstructured time at all, let alone days in a row of it.

Scott's hand around hers is warm, his grip firm. The other has drifted from her calf past her knee and most of the way up her thigh, and he's drawing his fingertip back and forth across the inseam of her jeans where the topstitching has frayed and the fabric is wearing thin.

He has a girlfriend again, she recalls. Not that that ever seems to matter to him. The girlfriend even looks a little like Tessa, absurdly; small-framed, fine-featured. Not from every angle but from certain ones, for sure. She hasn't met her yet but she's seen enough photos on Facebook to know.

A little cautiously, uncertain of her welcome, she shifts herself over his lap, straddling him, and tilts her head to brush her lips against his, so he doesn't have to crane his neck.

"I was worried you were mad at me," he sighs into her mouth, and he reaches for her hair.

"Don't move, you're supposed to be recuperating," she whispers, taking both his hands in hers and kissing them, left, then right, and setting them down at his sides.

He flushes a little when she pulls her sweatshirt over her head and he sees that she wasn’t wearing a bra underneath it, and flushes more deeply when she stands for long enough to tug off her jeans and her underwear, but he keeps his hands to himself, even as she settles herself back where she was, straddling his hips, thighs spread wide.

"Scott," she says. "I want you to look at me."

He probably couldn't turn away from her even if he wanted to, not given the stiffness from the strain that really does need rest and time, but she cups his cheek in the palm of her left hand to hold his line of sight steady on her face. She slides her right hand over her breasts and down her abdomen between her cunt and his crotch, pressing the back of it against him, so he can feel the movement when she slips two fingers into herself.

He bites his lip and groans, but he doesn't look down.

She fucks herself slowly, rolling her hips and grinding against her palm, stroking his cheek with her fingertips, his skin soft underneath the rough stubble.

"Will you come this way?" he whispers, and she nods, and slides her fingers from her cheek to his lips and then into his mouth. He traces them with the tip of his tongue, and that's what does it, remembering his tongue on her cunt, and her eyes flutter closed involuntarily when she comes against her own hand.

Shaking, she shifts off his lap and onto her knees on the floor in front of him and unzips his jeans, pulling his cock free. When she looks up at him, his eyes are narrowed, his teeth digging into his lip, the muscles of his abdomen contracting with the strain of keeping still.

"I need you to watch this, too," she murmurs, and takes the tip of his cock lightly between her lips, barely touching him with her tongue, and once she's certain he's looking—he's looking at her with such focus, eyes wide, pupils dilated, she has to turn away—she swallows the rest of him, as deep as she can manage.

She doesn't realize that she was waiting for him to say her name until he gasps it. Only a few moments later he comes in her mouth with a curse through gritted teeth, his hands clenched into fists.

"I don't know if we should have done that," he says, as she lets him go, taking his hands in hers to kiss them again, and bringing them, finally, to her hair, damp now with sweat, clinging to her forehead.

" _You_  didn't do anything," she says.

"Or if we should do it again," he adds, but as he looks down at her, his eyes flicker over her parted lips, still wet, like the only thing he wants is to be contradicted.

"Not tonight, anyway. I'm ordering a pizza and then I'm putting you to bed," she says, getting up from the floor and pulling her sweatshirt back on.

"You don't have to stay," he says.

"You get gloomy when you're alone," she says. "I'll sleep on the couch."

When Marina's back from Helsinki their training ramps up again, and they approach it with optimism informed by caution, like taking a mulligan in foul weather, newly cognizant of a crosswind. Scott insists that she shouldn't favour his neck, he'll tell her if it hurts, but she can't help herself, can't keep her hands off it in practice, feeling for tension; can't bring herself to throw her weight around him the way their lifts demand, even though Johnny scolds her for it.

"Cassandra's coming to watch us in Windsor," Scott tells her at the gym on the second-last Wednesday in October, the day before they're scheduled to drive up. She snorts with laughter before she can stop herself, and he looks a little offended.

"Sorry," she says, hardly able to get the words out around the fit of giggles that has overwhelmed her at the thought of Scott's present romantic imbrication. "She's very nice, I know you take your relationship with her very seriously. Can’t wait to dance with you at the wedding."

"Leave me alone about it, at least I know I'm an asshole," he says, swatting her shoulder.

He wrenches his neck again during the last lift of their short dance, and he doesn't drop her, but it's closer than it's ever been.

Afterward she can't shake the feeling that it has something to do with fooling around, something to do with making fun of him, like she was tempting fate, but there's no time to find him alone, of course, because he goes to meet Cassandra right after the press conference and she whisks him away to the physio and massage therapist before Tessa has a chance to—to what, apologize?

They don't see each other the night before the free dance, either. He leaves for dinner right after their afternoon practice and doesn't come back to his room that night, which she spends eating ice cream and refamiliarizing herself with the grim state of Canadian comedy TV next to Piper, sprawled together across one of the queen beds in their shared room, until they both fall asleep in front of a particularly unfunny  _22 Minutes_.

Something about his absence the day before, or about this being the first crack at it in competition since they missed Finlandia, makes their Carmen program more intense than she expected it to be, even after all the intensity of practice.

He whispers something vulgar and unrepeatable in her ear when he runs his hand up her leg, and she shoves him away with more force than the movement requires; her lips make contact their choreography does not call for with his crotch during one of their lifts, and he grazes the inside of her fishnet-clad thigh with his teeth when she flips up and onto his shoulders. By the final pose they're both exhausted and breathing hard, but she could swear she feels him gasp against her abdomen when she runs her fingers through his hair behind his ear and tugs it sharply. It wasn't pretty or clean, but their victory is a landslide.

Cassandra made a reservation for celebratory brunch the morning after the gala. Tessa's invited, Scott tells her, but she declines, opting to take Kate up on her offer to drive her back to Canton that night instead, with some excuse about how they have to leave for Moscow in less than two weeks and there's so much she needs to catch up on before they go, so she just can't spare the extra night away.

"You might actually like her if you met her," says Scott, when they're hauling her suitcases out of her room to the elevator. "You don't have to keep avoiding her."

"I'm not," she says. "See you Wednesday. Drive safe."

"See you," he says, wrapping one arm around her shoulders, and then the elevator door slides open and she steps back, pulling the suitcases after her into the empty car. He's still standing there awkwardly in the hall when the door slides closed between them.

Somehow they don't end up with much time to themselves before Rostelecom, and even when they get there. Between last-minute tweaks to costumes and last-minute attempts to focus on the elements they didn't nail in Windsor and Tessa's ongoing paranoia about the integrity of Scott's neck, she hardly has any spare mental capacity to devote to what happened at the beginning of October, let alone to reorganize their schedule so they could sneak away for even an hour or two.

They win, like it's no contest.

On the podium, Scott's hand drifts low on the small of her back and she has to take a deep steadying breath to stop herself from flinching away from him. Her superstitious brain latches on to any pattern it can, and as she mouths the words to the anthem, she pleads with it in her head:  _not this, we didn't win because I kept my hands off him, it has nothing to do with anything, please, don't think it’s this._

In Sochi in November—their first sight of the Olympic venue—Marina is preoccupied with some hitch in her litigation and spends most of her time locked up in her room in conference calls, or reading documents on her phone, her expression stony, instead of hounding them about fine-tuning details of their programs they're still working out.

Scott, ever the opportunist, pulls her aside before the short dance press conference and leads her to an unlocked supply closet a few hairpin turns away from the hall to the locker rooms.

"Elena told me about this," he says. "Soundproofed."

Maybe it really was, because some prior opportunist had evidently pulled out a cardboard pallet of paper towels from between a pair of steel shelving units to reveal a slender expanse of cream-coloured brick wall, a little broader than Scott's shoulder width, leaving the pallet abandoned in the middle of the floor.

"Really pulled out all the stops, didn't they," she says.

The door clicks shut behind them and he latches it and then he's all over her, pressing her back against the wall, yanking her hair loose from its chignon with one hand, fumbling in his back pocket for a condom with the other, but when he finds it, she waves it off.

"It's fine," she says.

"Really," he says. "Depo still?"

"No, the ring."

"Whatever you'd like," he says.

Before she can stop herself, her brain settles for a moment on wondering what his safe sex negotiation had been with his girlfriend, and she's almost overwhelmed with a wave of anxious nausea about what will happen tomorrow since they don't exactly have a wide margin for error, but then he's kissing a hot trail down her neck to her collarbone and he's gripping her ass with both hands, and between them it's enough to distract her.

He breaks away for long enough to unbutton his jeans and push them down, and she pulls off her leggings, and he grabs her again and shoves her back against the wall, and she wraps her legs around his hips, and he reaches between them to push her thong to one side, and then he's inside her, hot and hard and wet. She can't get leverage to push back against him so she digs her fingernails into the back of his neck and bites his lips, making him yelp with pain into her mouth and fuck her more forcefully, and she almost sobs when she comes, with the taste of his blood on her tongue.

When he moves to pull out of her she stops him, wrapping her legs more tightly around his hips.

"Come inside me," she whispers against his neck, and he does, shuddering.

They breathe together for a few long moments before she unwraps her legs from around him, and he sets her down lightly in the centre of the closet, between the paper towel pallet and a stack of bleach bottles.

"We'd better head down there," he says.

"Better find my pants first," she says.

At the press conference he rests his palm chastely on her knee, like they're just close colleagues who had a slightly disappointing performance but are optimistic that they can work harder and do better tomorrow if they believe in themselves and each other. She can't tear her focus away from his hand on her, warm and sure, and his come dripping out of her, slow and wet.

It's all she can do to smile and nod as he handles the questions directed at them, and as soon as they can go, she half-drags him out of the conference room and into the stairwell, where she shoves his hand down the front of her leggings unceremoniously and growls into his ear when she comes around his fingers, and from there into a cab back to the hotel, the longest six minutes of her life, and then quickly upstairs to her room, where she latches the deadbolt and then pushes him to his knees, kicking off her shoes and her leggings and thong, grabbing his hair, and shoving her cunt at his mouth, still slippery with him.

The following day, what elements they skated cleanly in practice they can’t manage when it counts.

She feels like she might vomit when Charlie pats her shoulder conciliatorily from atop the podium, but manages to quell the urge until she's safely off the ice and back in the labyrinthine hall and has found a secluded trash can.

When Scott catches up to her she almost sobs her apology to him for knowing that fucking him would ruin their chances, and she almost dry heaves again when he tells her that it's not her fault and they'll keep working at it and they'll get it eventually, he's never understood that she can't have an apology hanging in the air, refused. But there's no explaining it, so she lets him rub her back, and imagines that it counts as forgiveness.

Cassandra comes to watch them in Mississauga in January, which is where Tessa finally meets her for the first time, rather unexpectedly, in the hotel lobby. She's chagrined to discover that Cassandra's hair has been dyed darker than it was in any of the photos she's seen, and now it matches her own.

"You were our good luck charm in Windsor," says Tessa, pulling her into a hug. "Thanks for being here, it's so wonderful to meet you."

Scott scowls at her from just outside Cassandra's line of sight.

He stays with her, in her apartment in Toronto, and both their programs are the cleanest they've been all season.

In February they fly to Osaka. Cassandra planned to come but at the last minute she couldn't get the time off work after all, and when Scott tells her, like it's just some inconsequential logistical thing, her heart sinks through the floor.

He has a room to himself somehow, with a single king-sized bed, from some administrative mix-up, and they organize an arrangement in whispers during practice for her to meet him there the second night.

"Do you think it might be better if we're a little more pent-up," she says, right when she walks in, as soon as the door's closed, no use putting it off.

"Better for what?" he asks.

"For, uh, Carmen," she says. "For the characters."

"Ah," he says. "Method acting."

"Right," she says.

"You can just tell me if you don't want to sleep with me anymore," he says.

"No," she says, wincing. "It's not that. I've just—noticed that we—when we slept together, this season, we fucked up more than when we didn't."

"You mean we didn't fuck up as much when Meryl and Charlie weren't there," he says.

She hadn't noticed, but he's not wrong. Her stomach unclenches a little at the prospect that the pattern her superstition had latched onto might be overdetermined.

"Oh," she says.

"It's up to you," he says.

She's still standing stiffly by the door, and he's leaning back on the bed in a Team Canada T-shirt from Vancouver and grey sweatpants, his body language welcoming and familiar, and her resolve falters a little.

"Well," she says. "There's pent-up, and there's pent-up, you know, we don't have to quit cold turkey or anything."

"Sure," he says.

She takes off her shoes and shrugs off her cardigan to hang on the hook in the little foyer and approaches the bed, suddenly feeling more shy about him than she had in years.

"May I kiss you," he says, when she sits down next to him.

"Please," she says, and he does, leaning in and brushing his lips against hers, so tenderly she can hardly breathe. He brings one hand to her collarbone, playing with the neckline of her blouse, tracing the edge of it without touching her skin.

"Could you undress me," she asks, and he does, unbuttoning the blouse slowly from top to bottom and pausing to fold it, unzipping her jeans and sliding them down, reaching around her to unfasten the clasp of her bra, slipping his fingers under the edges of her underwear and drawing them off of her, while she watches him, breathing fast.

Their eyes meet and she nods, like she's giving him permission for something, she's not sure what.

"I'm just going to kiss you, that's all," he says, and starts with her mouth again, then her jaw, her neck, her shoulder, her wrists and hands, her collarbones, and her breasts, raising goosebumps on her arms and spreading a deep flush across her chest.

When he shifts from the bed to the floor in front of her, kissing softly down her abdomen and at the top of each thigh, she moves her hands to cradle the back of his head. He pauses to free himself from her grasp, taking both her hands in his and kissing them, left, then right, and setting them down at her sides.

"I really am just going to kiss you," he murmurs. He spreads the lips of her cunt apart with his fingers, and he really does just kiss her, his mouth warm and wet around her clit when he draws it between his teeth, his tongue soft and insistent, but he doesn't slide it into her, even when she pushes her hips toward him for more and even when she comes, feeling oddly forlorn, whimpering desperately for his fingers inside her.

He's so hard when he climbs back onto the bed and draws her into his arms to kiss her mouth again, but he pulls her hands away when she reaches for his cock, and just holds her instead, throbbing against the curve of her hip, stroking her hair, neither of them with anything to say.

She falls asleep there without expecting to, not realizing until they're both roused by his alarm first thing the next morning.

Most of the way through the free dance her calves seize up so sharply that she almost passes out. It hasn't been this bad in a long time, and she has to stop, even though she's used to pushing through pain, and they work it out with the referee so they can continue, but the damage is already done, and it's not enough, like she's being punished.

Cassandra comes to watch them again in London, because it's so close to home.

During the free dance Scott  _roars_  at her when her Carmen rejects him. They both misstep after that, novel mistakes, all minor ones but too much in the aggregate, and it's too uncontrolled even for the narrative their program is supposed to weave, and of course, it's not enough, again.

Not enough, but not because she fucked him, this time, at least.

From the podium she finds Cassandra in the crowd, and she's between his parents and hers, all of them on their feet.

They head back to Canton for a few days to debrief with Marina and to get organized for the impending tour season and summer training before their respective vacations. They've been allocated a couple of weeks, which Tessa is spending with her sister on a lavender farm B&B in Provence, and Scott with Cassandra on some beach somewhere, she'll probably have to hear all about it afterward.

When they're leaving the rink together for the last time, he stops her in the foyer.

"I wanted to say that I'm sorry," he says.

"Oh," she says, taken aback. "For what?"

"We got off to a bad start this season," he says. "And I feel like it's my fault, the injury, and then I wasn't back in shape after, and it really threw us off, and it's on me."

"No," she says, and taking a deep breath, tries her apology again. "I shouldn't have fooled around with you, that's what threw us off. We should have stayed focused on the work."

His jaw clenches the way it does when he's jealous about something, and she regrets saying anything at all when he refuses her again.

"Jesus, Tessa," he says. "You can't just do something you feel guilty about and then make it my problem, I even told you to stop sleeping with me if you felt weird about it."

Stung, she tries again.

"I'm not guilty, I just—"

"You're so guilty you made it into a superstition so you could obsess about it without having to deal with it, don't lie to me, I fucking saw it."

Other people are drifting in and out of the foyer: a gymnastics team that shares the facility with them, people on their way to and from the physiotherapist's office, an Officemax delivery of reams of paper on a cart with a squeaky caster. They're hissing at each other under their breath, and it's the worst place to have this discussion, which is probably why he chose it. In public she can't kiss him to deflect or distract, and he knows it.

"You're the one who should feel guilty, if you like her so much," she says, petulantly. "Does Cassandra know she looks like me when you fuck her from behind?"

"Fuck this," he says, and turns to go.

"Have fun in Cabo or wherever," she says to his retreating back, and he flips her the bird over his shoulder on his way out the door.

Her flight out isn't until the next afternoon, and she spends the whole evening ruthlessly scrubbing the season's detritus from the inside of her townhouse, all the little housekeeping errands there hasn't been time to do because she was away so often—baseboards, the inside of the oven, furnace vents, the tops of the kitchen cabinets.

Scott had never treated her rituals or superstitions with anything other than patience.

For the first couple of hours she's furious about the cruelty of his dismissiveness, but later, scrubbing the vinyl kitchen floor on her hands and knees, eyes stinging with sweat and oven cleaner fumes, she starts second-guessing herself, and no number of iterations of positive therapy slogans can save her from wondering how many other of her motives might be opaque to her, even when she says them out loud to herself in the empty living room.

The last thing she does before her cab comes to take her to the airport the next day is unfasten the safety pin from the inside breast pocket of her blazer, the one she always pins to every costume before every competition skate. She sets it on the mantle, for safekeeping, in case she needs it when she gets back, but she'll try doing without it for a while, just to see how it goes.


End file.
